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Today in class, my new American Studies thesis students were challenged to answer this question, how will doing a thesis change me as a person and affect my life?

They came up with a lot of good answers. They talked about confidence, work ethic, intellectual achievement, playing to their strengths, and managing their time. When it came to me to tell them what I believe the answer is, I told them something like this:

The thesis is a learning experience on a large scale. It’s yours, you own it entirely. You are the captain of your own ship, and as a result your successes will be yours and so will your failures. The way the thesis will change you is that when you are presented with a seemingly insurmountable task, whether it’s related to career, personal life, family life, romance, projects, or journeys, you will be able to look at it as a whole and know that you are capable of doing the work to get where you need to be. You won’t doubt yourself. When you’re presented with something that, at the outset, seems near impossible, you will push forward. You will know to break it into manageable pieces, work on it everyday, slowly and steadily. Even when you’re tired, and fed up, you will always see the forest beyond the trees and you will always trust that you will get there. The thesis will teach you that you have every bit of will, and grit, and motivation you need to do whatever you set out to do.

Large scale research and writing is very difficult. There’s a reason why not a lot of students sign up for majors that require work of this nature when they’re undergraduates, and there’s a reason why the students who do are exceptional. There’s a reason why when they write this thesis, which is, for many, their first major research and writing project, that they work closely with TAs, professors, advisors, and each other. Part of what makes this a valuable experience is knowing that they can fall, they usually don’t. But if they get lost, or need a hand – one will be there. We joke about this – “help will always be given in thesis class to those who ask for it.”

I did my first large scale (or it looked large at the time) writing project in IB2 (12th grade). It was called an Extended Essay and it’s basically a miniature version of an undergraduate thesis. I then wrote an undergraduate thesis, and capped it off with a master’s thesis. While I was doing that I started helping other people write. I love helping other people write.

Research driven academic writing might seem dry and sad to a lot of people, but I believe it provides one of the most poignant, useful metaphors for getting through life I have ever encountered, which brings me to my point.

As of today I have lost 80lbs. When I started losing weight the idea that I would ever get to 80lbs down seemed impossible. Even from my current vantage point, there is still so far to go. Starting a weight loss project where I decided to set about losing 200lbs (half my starting weight) was scary, it was scary because I didn’t know if I could do it. I didn’t know if I had the physical capacity or, perhaps more importantly, the emotional and psychological wherewithal. I knew all the data about dieting and about massive weight loss, that it often doesn’t work, and many dieters don’t make it past 10%, many people never reach their goal, and many people end up gaining to weigh more than they did at the beginning. Losing weight is socially, emotionally, and culturally stressful. At the outset, in the first 20lbs (which came off quick, but were invisible) I interrogated my choices a lot, I questioned whether my motivation was good enough, whether my choices were noble rather than being selfish or, perhaps, not even mine.

However, in the last 60lbs, I’ve learned so much about myself, and my motivations. I’ve learned that my motivations are complicated and are in a perpetual flux. I’ve learned that this is a project, it is a large, seemingly daunting project, and I’ve learned that in order to get where I want, and achieve what I set out for I have to be committed. While there are days were I don’t count calories so closely (or count them but don’t worry about them) every day is in service of the larger project. Not only the physical elements of weight loss (the eating, the working out) but the emotional and psychological parts. In order to get up everyday and want to keep doing this, I have to know that I am capable.

Losing large amounts of weight is so much like writing. It’s so much like writing that everyday gets easier because I realize more and more that this difficult thing is just like the difficult things I’ve done before. The difference between success and failure is patience, commitment, grit, and knowing that no matter what happens as you go, it is the process that is valuable. When you’ve finished a thesis, and smack it down with the familiar thump of a 100 pages, when you hold it for the first time as it finishes printing and it’s warm and smells like toner, it’s finished and and while it still needs to be graded, and (you hope) read – your relationship with it is finished. Everyday, every mile, every pound I lose feels like a page of a thesis. Meeting a micro-goal is like finding that book you really need, or writing a literature review that you don’t fucking hate.* Weight loss for me is a writing process, it’s a story about my body that I am wholly in control of, it requires my dedication and motivation, and requires that I not let other people derail my ideas, or hijack my work. This isn’t about other people’s ideas, this is my project and I’m writing it with my body. Every success is my success and while I undeniably have excellent people around me to support me, when it comes down to it, it’s mine. When my feet hurt so much I can barely walk, when I’m so bored of eating the same weird foods, and when all I want is just not think about it, I’m the person who has to. And I do because I’ve written, I’ve written long, complicated things, I’ve watched students follow wild trains of thought to magnificent conclusions, and because the body follows the brain.

Writing a thesis changes you in that you learn that if you need to write, if you want to write, you sit down and you write.
It affects your life because you learn that if you want to do something, you look at it as a whole, you think about what’s it’s really made of; the research, the skills, the time, the process, and you make a plan and you follow through with that plan.

There are a few things in life that are expected of women, a lot of the things are mundane stereotypes that no one really expects, the one that chiefly concerns me is that we’re expected to be feminists.

Feminism is peddled to preteen girls, and then to young women, and once you get to college, it’s being unceremoniously rammed down your throat and if you head off to graduate school, prepare for the fire storm if you dare utter the words, “I’m not a feminist.” Feminists are the door-to-door salespeople of ideology.

Are you sure you don’t need some liberation? No, thank you. I’m fine. Are you certain you aren’t feeling repressed by men? Um, yeah, but I feel okay and I still feel productive, thanks. No, you aren’t, you need to embrace your womanhood and fight against the Man! Well, I agree there some pretty serious issues with authoratative nature of patriarchcal society but I still feel as if there’s important and productive thinking around and against it, that um, isn’t yours. And I feel fine about it.

I understand feminism. I understand why it’s important, it’s first and second waves, where it came from and how it’s been valuable to our culture. I understand that equal rights among men and women is important and that feminism forms an important building block for the queer and gender studies to follow – but I do not want that word floating over my head and stapled to me.

I am not a feminist.

*gasp* How dare I?!

I know most people will, at this point, nervously crack their knuckles and tell me that I’m a sex positive feminist or a modified feminist. Usually, I just accept these things and move on, because the idea of a liberal, educated woman in her twenties rejecting feminism is truly unfathomable.

Why, I wonder? Is it because we’re supposed to be feminists?

I’ve been very lucky and have had the opportunity to read a lot about feminism, the formative texts and the important writers, the voices that defined and invigorated this ideaology. To be frank, at it’s core, as a theoretical construct moving through post-structalism and postmodernism it is completely acceptable. I mean, who doesn’t love a handy-dandy feminist lens?! However, in the greater culture, the one I live in, it’s a monster. It’s fundamentally painted as a rejection, maybe even an alternative to patriarchy, but because of the profoundly binary nature of rejection, it becomes like a form of mimicry, a reductive opposition based on something that it can neither outdo or outwit. It ends up being condemning, pleasure-denying and fundamentally unproductive.

Feminism is fabulous, interesting and engaging, in theory. Watching the various and sundry iterations of that theory attempt application is another matter all together. I guess I should make clear, I’m not talking about Irigaray here, but rather that feminism that has been sold to me, making me a basic ideological consumer, in need of this way of thought in order to function as a woman, because second wave feminism happened and we’re all still gasping for air, and failing to find our feet and the results are treacherously conformist.